• 
  
• 
  

  ACS:Law chases those it suspects of sharing copyrighted content Photograph: Stringer Shanghai/REUTERS

  BSkyB, one of the UK's largest broadband providers, has said it will no longer cooperate with the requests of controversial solicitors' firm ACS:Law and that it will challenge them in court, after around 8,000 of its customers had their personal information leaked online.
  The details – including credit card details and addresses – of thousands of broadband users became accessible via the firm's website in the aftermath of a series of "denial of service" attacks, orchestrated by members of internet forums protesting about the methods of tracking and notification employed by the company.
  The Information Commissioner has said a fine of £500,000 could be levied upon ACS:Law, which also faces a disciplinary tribunal by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, legal action by pressure group Privacy International and legal action from people it apparently wrongly-identified as downloading illegal material.
  The company appears to compile lists of alleged infringers tracked by IP addresses, then appeals for a court order to the relevant internet service provider to hand over more information about the customer before taking the accused to court.
  Sky now says it will challenge these court orders until ACS:Law can prove it stores customer informtion in a secure way. A Sky spokesman said:
  

  "Following recent events, we have suspended all cooperation with ACS:Law with immediate effect. This suspension will remain in place until ACS:Law demonstrates adequate measures to protect the security of personal information.
  "We continue to be very concerned at the apparent loss of data held by ACS:Law and by the actions of those who have sought to publicise the identities of individual customers. Like other broadband providers, Sky can be required to disclose information about customers whose accounts are alleged to have been used for illegal downloading. We support the principle that copyright material should be protected and we cooperate with court orders requiring disclosure.
  "Because the security of customer information is also a high priority, we only ever disclose such data in encrypted form. In addition, we have an agreement with ACS:Law that requires data to be stored and used safely and securely."

  • Update 29/09: Separately, broadband provider Plusnet – which had around 400 of its customers' information exposed during the security breach of ACS:Law's website – today appeared to throw its weight behind increased transparency in the way companies collect information about those it suspects of downloading copyrighted content. The ISP, which was bought by BT in 2007, also suspended cooperation with ACS:Law. It said: "Due to serious concerns about the integrity of the processes used to obtain and store private customer information we are suspending with immediate effect the supply of any further customer data to ACS:Law until we are satisfied that weaknesses in these procedures have been addressed."
  

  A spokewoman told the Guardian: "Our first concern is with our customers but we have been obliged to respond to court orders requiring that we disclose customer data. However, there is increasing evidence that there are deep concerns regarding the integrity of the process being used by rights holders to obtain customer data from ISPs for pursuing alleged copyright infringements.
  "We need to have further confidence that the initial information gathered by rights holders is robust and that our customers will not be treated unfairly. We are urgently exploring how this can be assured, including through the assistance of the courts."

  The investigation by the Information Commissioner will try to determine whether the data exposure was a result of ACS:Law's method of storing information about people it suspects of sharing copyrighted material, or whether it was a direct result of the denial of service attacks against the website. The 365MB of information – which has since been distributed around the internet – containts the details of around 8,000 Sky broadband subscribers, 400 Plusnet customers, 5,000 Britons accused of illicit filesharing and emails between ACS:Law and its clients.
  
  Alex Hanff, of Privacy International, said the data breach was "one of the worst ever in the UK", while online advocacy organisation Open Rights Group today warned that the "unwarranted private surveillance" of people accused of downloading is a direct outcome of the Digital Economy Act [DEA]. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told the Guardian: "ACS:Law appears to be preparing to use DEA processes to target filesharers and Ofcom's code is wide open for them using that process, so that's a massive concern. This is all pretty terrible because, to be frank, Ofcom's system is going to throw up these situations as they're allowing private companies to exploit them."

Tech giant Apple made its iPhone 4 launch in China, the world's largest Internet and mobile phone market, on Saturday after opening two Apple stores in Beijing and Shanghai.

Some people spent the night waiting outside the stores to be among the first to buy the phone, which will be sold in China for the equivalent of $745 for the 16 GB model or $893 for the 32 GB model.
Prices in China are higher than in the U.S., where the 16 GB model costs $199 and the 32 GB model $299.
The Chinese not only can buy iPhone 4 in Apple stores, but also with the phone state operator China Unicom, which until Friday had received around 50,000 orders.
The Chinese seem increasingly interested in the Apple brand as the number of iPhones 4 orders has been much higher than when the original iPhones went on sale.
China has more than 420 million Internet users and more than 800 million mobile phone users.

FB mobile

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came forward to clarify rampant rumors that his company was working with a mobile handset manufacturer to make a Facebook-branded smartphone. The problem is, he didn't address the question.

In an interview this week with TechCrunch, Zuckerberg asserted that people can mean "very different things" when they use the phrase "build a phone." Facebook is not looking to compete with smartphone manufacturers, he said, nor is it interested in developing its own handset operating system.

Clear as Mud

Perhaps the reason Zuckerberg is hedging his bets so carefully is that the company really doesn't know yet what it intends to do to take the Facebook experience from the level of application to the level of ubiquitous social networking interface, suggested Josh Martin, senior analyst with Strategy Analytics.
There's no good reason yet for Facebook to "take any option off the table," he told TechNewsWorld.
What the market is likely to see is a number of different trial projects. "They've got enough money to experiment," Martin stressed.

Facebook the Verb

A possible roadblock to acceptance of a Facebook phone is that consumers are not quite ready to accept Facebook as a verb rather than the name of a site or application, Carl Howe, director with the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld.
Long ago, Xerox (NYSE: XRX) made photocopying into a verb, and, more recently, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) made querying a search engine into one, too. The real question is whether consumers are ready "to make Facebook the be-all and end-all of their online existence," Howe said -- especially their mobile online existence.
"I'm not sure they've gotten permission to be a real consumer brand, as opposed to an activity," Howe noted. As one of myriad social networking services -- albeit an enormous one -- Facebook may not do well if it's perceived to be acting as mediary between mobile users and their beloved Internet.
"Is Facebook the center of your mobility?" Howe asked. "That's yet for consumers to decide."

Chatting With INQ?

Still, the manufacture of phones designed specifically toward social networking continues to roll forward, noted Martin. UK-based INQ Mobile is a prime example. The company, owned by mobile provider Hutchison Whampoa, already markets a phone it calls the "Chat 3G," but which is popularly referred to as a "Facebook Phone." In fact, the company's current tagline uses Facebook terminology when it declares that "yesterday is so 317 updates ago."
Neither Facebook nor INQ responded to requests for comment in time for publication of this article, but Martin maintains that the company is an obvious choice if Facebook is indeed considering rolling out its own phone.
"To some extent, it's worth likening them to Netflix," he explained. "There's a benefit to Facebook in having the ability to be ubiquitous, to be on as many devices as they can."
Thus, the Facebook Phone may not be an all-or-nothing proposition, but rather one of many approaches. Although Zuckerberg has said the company is not working on a mobile OS now, that doesn't rule out the possibility of developing one in the future, Martin argued, "especially if they think they can develop an OS that's attractive to a specific market that they can't attract otherwise."
Still, the company must be careful not to alienate current partners with lots of clout in the mobile arena, like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google, Martin noted.
Any move that would "disincentivize" partners that have made significant investments already in smartphone hardware and software should give Facebook "reason for pause," he said.
Facebook also has dedicated significant resources toward its development of apps and interfaces based on HTML5, Martin pointed out. That's a significant investment in a platform-neutral and OS-neutral strategy, and the company is unlikely to abandon it anytime soon.

Clean up your Gmail Inbox Automatically

Gmail has always had an excellent spam filter that keeps junk messages out of your Inbox. Then, earlier this week, Google added a reverse feature that is quite unique to Gmail – it’s called the Priority Inbox.
Priority Inbox is like having a personal secretary whose job is to sort your incoming mail based on importance. She knows about your friends, your colleagues and other people with whom you interact regularly and can therefore categorize your email accordingly.
Priority Inbox is something similar – it’s an intelligent, self-learning filter that automatically puts your most important email messages at the top of your Inbox so that you may deal with them first. The feature is now live for both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts.

Sort your Emails by Priority

Priority Inbox has one limitation – it works with incoming emails only and doesn’t really care about the hundreds and thousands of messages that are lying in your Inbox unattended.
I have been testing an impressive web app called Other Inbox that brings much need order to your existing Gmail Inbox and looks like a perfect complement to Google’s Priority Inbox.

Other Inbox scans your mailbox for less-important emails and sorts them into relevant categories. For instance, email alerts from CNN, BBC, Google News, etc. would go into the News folder while messages from Amazon, iTunes, etc. will find their place in the Shopping folder.
You just have to authorize Other Inbox to access your Gmail account once and it does the rest automatically. Other Inbox is reasonably good at categorizing your emails but you also have the option to choose your own labels (see next screenshot).

Depending up the size of your inbox, it might take anywhere between 5-10 minutes for the whole process to complete.
I have used this service with my Gmail and Google Apps mail accounts and the results have been fairly impressive. Now if I ever want to clear my inbox of all notifications from Twitter and Facebook, I can simply open the “Social Media” label and empty it with a click.
That said, a lot of us will obviously not feel very happy sharing our mailboxes with a third-party. Now they do have a privacy policy in place and you can always manually revoke access to sites that are authorized to access your Gmail and Google Account.

Use Skype As a Fax Machine: Send a Fax from Computer

How can you send a fax online via Skype - this has been one of the very frequently discussed topics on the Skype forums for a long time.



Well, the developers of Pamela Calls Recorder (an add-in for recording Skype calls) have released another excellent Skype plugin called PamFax that lets you send and receive fax documents from your computer to any number (fax machine) in the world though Skype.

You type in the facsimile number of the recipient (who uses a real fax machine, not Skype), select the document file, a fax cover sheet and hit send. You can chose to receive fax delivery confirmation via Skype chat or in your email inbox.

In Windows Explorer, you can fax any supported document from the context menu of the file. A PamFax toolbar button is added to Microsoft Office to directly fax the current document from Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.

Unlike the free Fax via Email services, PamFax would require to pay via Skype Credits which can be linked to your PayPal account. Fax rates per page vary between € 0.17 and € 1.59 depending on the country of the recipient. There are however no subscriptions or monthly fees.

A Guide to Choosing an Internet Based Fax Service

Although most people have switched to email, there are those rare occasions when you have to send signed documents with your written signature and a fax just seems like an appropriate solution then.
You don’t need a dedicated fax machine any more as there are quite a few good web based services, both paid and free, that let you send and receive faxes using your computer itself without requiring any extra hardware. You don’t need a “fax modem” or even your traditional landline phone to send a fax via the computer.
How Internet Faxing Works?
Most online fax services work in a similar way. They give you a dedicated fax number and any fax message that’s sent to that number is forwarded to you as an email attachment. Alternatively, if you want to send a fax from your computer to another fax machine, you can send your document as an email attachment to the online fax service who in turn will forward it to the recipient’s fax machine.
Choosing an Internet Fax Service
After researching the plans and features of about a dozen Internet based faxing services, I have shortlisted the top 5 services that have all the necessary features and are most cost-effective.  They have plans for everyone from the consumer who needs to send or receive an occasional fax to the businessman who needs to send multiple faxes daily.
1. GotFreeFax.com – With Got Free Fax, you can send up to two faxes in a day for free to any number in the U.S. and Canada.
You can either use its online rich text editor to compose a fax or upload a PDF /Word file from your computer, type the recipient’s fax number and hit send. The service won’t add any advertisements or branding to your faxes. If you would like to send a fax to an international number, you can buy credits through PayPal.
2. myFax.com – My Fax allows you to send two faxes, with up to 10 pages each, per day for free. Unlike “Got Free Fax,” which only lets you send free faxes to US and Canada based numbers, My Fax supports a much large set of countries even for their free service.
MyFax offers a dedicated Fax number for an extra fee where you can receive faxes. All faxes sent to your personal fax number will arrive in your email inbox as PDFs.
3. GreenFax.com – With Green Fax you can again send and receive faxes via email. They offer a unique prepaid plan where you are only charged per page for sending faxes to US and Canada numbers without any monthly fees.
If you are sending a fax to an international number, you are billed per-minute of fax transmission time and unsuccessful transmissions are not charged.
4. eFax.com – If you need a fax number outside the USA, eFax is probably the best option for you. They offer your local fax numbers in 45 different countries for your incoming faxes. For a fixed monthly fee, you may receive up to 130 pages by fax per month while you pay a per page fee for sending faxes and this varies based on the destination.
With eFax, you may either send and receive faxes via your email program or they also offer integration with Microsoft Office programs.
5. RingCentral Fax – With RingCentral, you can send faxes worldwide through an email message, via their web interface, or from any Windows application. They charge a fixed monthly fee and their outgoing fee seems to be among the lowest in the industry.
Internet Fax Services – Plan Comparison Chart
The following chart (full version) compares in detail the pricing plans of various online fax services and also the cost of sending faxes to some popular destinations.

These rates often apply to fax pages that take less than 60 seconds to transmit. If the fax transmission is taking longer than 60 seconds, some companies may bill you on a per-minute basis instead of per page.
[*] FaxPipe and MaxEmail are two other Internet based fax services that let you send and receive faxes and they have an overall lower monthly fee but it has be paid annually.
Which is the best Internet Faxing Service for me?
It depends on your country of residence, the volume of documents that you plan to fax in a month and the location of your client (if you wish to receive incoming faxes).
For most consumers, who have to send a fax occasionally , GotFreeFax looks like a perfect service. They do not charge a monthly fee, the rates for international outgoing faxes are competitive and you can send a fax from the browser without requiring any setup.
If your clients /contacts are based outside the U.S., you can go with eFax as they will give you a local fax number in that country and your clients won’t have to dial an international number in order to send you a fax. RingCentral and myFax also offer attractive pricing plans for volume faxing.

Convert PDF Documents to SWF Flash Movies Online with PDFMeNot

Like Scibd and SlideShare, PDFMeNot is an online PDF to Flash converter that will instantly convert any Adobe PDF document into a Macromedia Flash (SWF) movie while preserving the original layout, image graphics and formatting.
The PDF to SWF converter can very useful when you have to embed PDF files in web pages for inline viewing or you want to read PDF files on a computer that has no Acrobat Reader.

Here’s how to create Flash movies from PDF documents:
1. Go to PDFMeNot.com (Username: stateless Password: systems) and type the URL of the PDF file – you can use this PDF link as an example. Alternatively upload a PDF from the local hard drive.
2. In your Firefox menu bar, click Tools -> Page Info -> Media. Select the object that has an SWF extension (e.g. pdfmenot.com/store/f6a29535da98cd1.swf)  and save it to your disk. That’s the SWF file created from your PDF document. For IE, here’s the trick to save Flash locally.
Bloggers can embed the following JS code in their web templates and PDF links will open in Flash SWF format via PDFMeNot.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pdfmenot.com/convert.js”></script>

While PDFMeNot is an extremely convenient option for quickly viewing PDF files in the browser without loading Adobe Reader, the downside is that the generated SWF objects contains Zoom but no Print and Search function. They are all supported in Macromedia Flash Paper format used by Scribd. Thanks Marshall.
Related: Convert PDF into 3D Flipbook Magazines, Embed PDF Files in Web Pages

Open DNS

When you type an address like www.yahoo.com in your browser address bar, the computer doesn’t know where yahoo.com points to and it will therefore ask the DNS server.
The job of a DNS server is to translate this human-readable web address (like www.yahoo.com) into a computer-readable number also known as an IP address (209.131.36.158). Once your computer knows the IP location of a web domain name, it opens the website in your browser.

DNS is such an integral part of our Internet life working behind the scenes every time we connect to a website. In most situations, our Internet Service Provider specifies the DNS Server address that we key into the browser network settings or the router.
Unfortunately, this can prove to be the weakest link in the entire workflow. For example, if the DNS server of your ISP is slow, the time it takes to resolve the web address adds up to the overall loading time of the website.
To solve this problem, we look at a simple and reliable service called OpenDNS that speeds up your Internet connection and also handles some other very important issues. There are no software to install, it’s very easy to set up and the price is just right – $0.

To use OpenDNS, all you have to do is open your Network Connections or Router’s settings page and update the default DNS server to point to the OpenDNS nameservers that are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
The whole process takes a few seconds but with this single step alone, you just made your computer safer and increased the overall browsing speed. Here’s why:
Unlike the DNS servers of your less reliable ISP, OpenDNS servers store the IP addresses of millions of websites in their cache so it would take less time to resolve your requests. So if you have asked for an IP address of a website that has been previously requested by another OpenDNS user, you will get the reply instantly.

Another huge advantage of using OpenDNS is that it blocks phishing websites from loading on your computer. It uses data from Phishtank, a community site that is also used by Yahoo! Mail to determine if some particular website is part of any online phishing scam.
OpenDNS also takes care of any typos that you commit while typing the name of popular websites. For instance, if you type www.gogle.com omitting the additional “o” by mistake, OpenDNS will open the main www.google.com site automatically. 

If you are a parent worried about kids visiting adult websites on the home computer, you can configure OpenDNS to block any adult website from loading on the computer. In fact, quite a few business places use OpenDNS to block social sites like MySpace and Facebook on employee computers.
Power users can assign abbreviations or OpenDNS Shortcuts to access their favourite websites more quickly.
For instance, you can set “mail” as a shortcut for http://mail.google.com/ or something like “a” for www.reallylongname.com – just type the shortcut to access the site. A good alternative for browser based bookmarks and it works across all computers where you have logged in to your OpenDNS account.

Now that you are prepared to switch to OpenDNS, please don’t expect huge gains in browsing speed since OpenDNS only improves the cycle between your computer and the DNS server.
And do keep handy the old DNS settings given by your ISP as you may need them in the extreme scenario when OpenDNS system goes down or you want to disable / remove OpenDNS completely from your computer.
www.opendns.com [Piece written for Financial Express newspaper]

Skylon

Called the Skylon, this British-designed spacecraft "will travel at five times the speed of sound using two internal engines that suck hydrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere to send it 18 miles above the ground - and out of Earth's atmosphere." Click here for more pictures.

New wave of 3D technology comes to TVs

Photo by Ed Sum.

January 22, 2010 - Life

by Ed Sum - Contributing Writer

Electronics consumers could be suffering from upgrade woes soon enough, since practically everyone in the entertainment industry is talking about 3DTV.
3DTVs are televisions capable of displaying objects in three-dimensional space. However, there’s one snag—everyone will have to wear glasses to experience the technology.
The first sets were unveiled at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas and will be available for purchase this summer. Companies like Sony, Samsung, DreamWorks Animation SKG, and Technicolor are pushing very hard to promote it, but it’s ultimately up to the consumer to embrace it.
“They’ll have to decide if they want to go down that path or not,” says Carl Parry, sales representative for Atlas Audio Video. “There have been lots of failed attempts in the past.”
3D technology reached its height of popularity with audiences during the ‘50s, but it was a far from perfect technology back then. Moviegoers wore paper glasses with each lens tinted a different colour.
On screen, there were two disjointed images with the same tint to represent the spatial difference. That gave a three-dimensional effect when combined and interpreted by the viewer’s brain.
Objects leapt out at the viewer, but the cheap technology was far from perfect and some had trouble seeing the 3D properly and complained of eyestrain.
The days of psychedelia are gone and in its place are polarized glasses that do the same thing. The improvement is that there are no badly tinted images. Audiences can now see true-to-life colours.
Theatres are enjoying a resurgence in 3D-movie attendance, with James Cameron’s Avatar leading the way. Cameron was one of the early proponents of 3D cinema and his film shows it off magnificently.
Still, some people think 3D TV will be just another passing fad. Retailers are cautious at best. At the consumer retail level, Parry is taking the-wait-and-see approach, which is being echoed over in corporate sales.
“I’d like to see 3DTV be adopted but, at this stage, I don’t really see it happening,” says Paul Jackson, sales representative for Metro Video Communications.
To embrace any new technology takes time and Jackson believes it’ll take at least five years.
“We are very optimistic about the long-term prospects for 3D at home,” says Candice Haymen, spokesperson for Sony Canada, “particularly as new technology standards are set and as new 3D-enabled devices make their way to the marketplace this year.”
There’s a lot at stake, especially with everyone but the consumer investing millions into this technology.
“The ability to deliver more 3D content will happen because the entire industry is working together to have enough of it by the time the first televisions roll out,” says Haymen.
Jackson, however, believes the television stations won’t have the revenue to buy new equipment every two or three years to keep up with the technology.
“If the film industry adopts it in a big way, it’ll happen really fast. If they’re relying on the broadcasters, I think it’ll go very slowly,” says Jackson.
Most stations have upgraded to provide HDTV because it’s finally affordable. To throw that out now and to buy a 3D television isn’t going to happen for most consumers.
Even then, what about the stations that only broadcast in 2D? Sony’s televisions have a smart chip installed so they can recognize what’s being watched. If it’s regular 2D content, they function just like any other television set. When there’s a signal saying there’s more, they’ll switch to that mode.
Whether or not 3DTV becomes the norm for television viewing in the future remains to be seen. There’s a lot of talk around it, but it could either be a passing fad or become the new norm.
Jackson says that while some content lends itself to 3D, he doesn’t see enough of a difference between watching most programming in 2D or 3D.
Jackson says that with 3D “you’re really limiting yourself to things like Avatar, sports, or nature shows.”

Ed on Jul 24, 2010 at 11:42 PM

It should be noted that the two disjointed images with the same tint should mean, the two images on screen have chromatically-opposing tints. The glasses merge the two images together for the brain to interpret it as a three dimensional image.